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On the Winterof WikiLeaks
I
’
drama from WikiLeaks and the arrest of co-founder Julian Assange will shake out.From the freezing of their bank accounts torevenge hackers targeting PayPal, online creditcard companies, and banks; from hundredsof sympathetic webmasters mirroring theexposed documents, to calls from electedo
cials for Assange’s (extra)judicial murder;developments occur on all sides quicker thanthe fastest internet connection and everythingthat’s happening as I write this in December will have been long superseded by the timethis issue is published. What’s important foranarchists is not only how we and our alliesdance with the foundational myth of the(now-indispensable?) internet – the allegedfree
ow of information – but the arguably more important issue of the meaning of accurately exposing the mundane duplicity of government policy-makers and -shapers. I wrote this a few issues back:
Secrecy, or the division of labor based onaccess to information, is a cornerstone of all government, all bureaucracy.
e mostimportant function of bureaucracy isself-preservation and the maintenance of hierarchy; restriction of knowledge is thebest and most e
ective guarantee for this…the smooth running of a bureaucracy isbased on the self-perpetuating cycle of knowledge and secrecy…
en thereis the secrecy necessary for diplomacy and espionage, not to mention war.
eobsession with secrecy [is] a standardoperating procedure for maintaininggovernment control. (
Anarchy
#60, Fall/ Winter 2005/6)
The predictable hypocrisy of the anti- WikiLeaks chorus is based on much morethan their alleged concern with potentialfuture lives lost (they obviously don’t give ashit about the ones for which they already bear direct responsibility). From the time of the initial embarrassments for the
US
warmachine with the release of classi
ed o
cialreports and the horrifying video “CollateralMurder,” through what has been dubbed“Cablegate,” the pro-government cliques havebeen calling for shooting the messenger, a notvery chivalrous act of power-mad oligarchs thatfell out of favor somewhere around a thousandyears ago.
e desire on the part of some
US
lawmakers to charge Assange under the 1917Espionage Act (because it has execution as apossible punishment) is only the most recent– and it is certain not to be the last – absurdstrategy of a bureaucratic establishmentdesperate to deflect attention from itself.Blaming the messenger is a well-wornexample of an
ad hominem
logical fallacy, yetin the ultra-patriotic ravings of politicians andpundits it becomes a convenient smokescreen
2
Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed
3
and distraction from the actual content of thedocuments and the fact that it is their ownsecurity apparatuses that are rife with breaches. And this is what the hue and cry isabout: exposure and embarrassment. Thesociopath caught in the act of stealing is notembarrassed about stealing, but of gettingcaught. Anarchists and other anti-statistsare already aware that elected and appointedofficials engage in mendacity, duplicity,chicanery, thievery, forgery, murder, and every imaginable antisocial act on a routine, almostinstinctive, basis; it is just how they work.
eold joke about how you can tell if a teenager(or lawyer, or politician, or police or military o
cer, or mainstream journalist, etc.) is lyingis obviously – and tragically – applicable withvarious o
cial responses to WikiLeaks.
e downside of all this is that information-saturated people are already overloaded withall sorts of real and imagined scandal. Furtheralong in my
ve-year old essay I wrote, “
eMarketplace of Ideas [the place where theinternet is supposed to excel] can withstandany and all challenges – disinformation andbiased reporting, scandalous insinuations,and outright lies are merely another pileof data to sift through in a search for somekind of overarching Truth. The glut of disinfotainment turns facts into a kindof white noise, which causes just abouteverything to be ignored and/or forgotten.” Inthe case of WikiLeaks, it doesn’t matter thatthe thousands of released and soon-to-be-released documents contain uncensored andunvarnished truth that was never meant to bepublicly scrutinized – at least before it had theright spin put on it. Part of the challenge forthose who believe that knowledge is power isthat the sheer volume of unedited documentsis overwhelming.
e mythical Public (at leasthere in the
US
) is so inured to talking headsspoonfeeding them soundbites that it remainsquestionable whether or not millions of pagesof un
ltered information can be of any actualuse for radical challenges to statecraft.
emost serious challenges to the legitimacy of government are still to be found in workplaceand neighborhood assemblies and on thestreets of London, Athens, Rome, Toronto,Cairo, Oakland, and the thousands of otherplaces where less photogenic resistance topolice malfeasance, political repression,economic exploitation, ecological destruction,and the generalized misery of postmoderncivilization takes place on a regular basis.
Editorial
On the Winter of WikiLeaksBernard Dumaine
bernardumaine.deviantart.com
Christian Edler
reality-must-die.deviantart.com
On the Cover: